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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 March 2016
“Water,” wrote the mayor’s council late in the nineteenth century, “is the only thing holding Algiers back from expanding its glory as the queen of African cities.” Paris uses 240 liters of water per person per day, it reported; New York, Philadelphia and Chicago 400 liters. Algiers could only muster a meager 60 liters per day per person, far below the levels necessary to feed a population, fill wells, and scrub a city of its toxins. For over half a century, the council reported, Algiers had thirsted after the clean water necessary to make it a great city. If the French were to make Algiers truly modern, they would need to solve this vexing problem of water.
Thus the council summed up one of the ongoing challenges in continuing settler colonialism in Algeria. Environmental projects—battling epidemic disease, drought, locust invasions, and providing/establishing hydraulic control—became important factors in the rise and expansion of the colonial state. In the midst of a crippling environmental disaster, water—access to fresh water for drinking, controlling agricultural infrastructure, and ensuring cities were “hygienic”—became a site of contention in the creation of the modern state. In this paper I will briefly examine how the physical control of water resources, along with discourses about modernity and modern governance, contributed to the expansion of the colonial state by the end of the 1860s.
1 Archives Nationales d’Algérie (from here on ANA): Fonds du Gouvernement Général de l’Algérie: Direction de l’Intérieur et des Beaux Arts: 261, Santé Publique. “Département d’Alger: Projet d’Alimentation en Eau de la Ville d’Alger et de sa Banlieue, et de Création de Force Motrice Hydraulique par la dérivation de l’Oued-Moktad et des cours d’eau avoisinants,” 1893.
2 Due to a combination of climatic disasters-drought, locust invasion, earthquakes, unseasonable cold, epidemic disease-and social, cultural, and political ruptures brought on by continued colonialism, about a quarter of the indigenous population of Algeria died between 1865 and 1871.
3 See especially Rey-Goldzeiguer, Annie, Le royaume arabe: la politique algérienne de Napoléon III, 1861–1870, (Alger: Société Nationale d’Edition et de Diffusion, 1977)Google Scholar.
4 Vatin, Jean-Claude, L’Algérie Politique: Histoire et Société (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1983), 112–114Google Scholar.
5 The settler newspapers of the Northern coast and plains were in agreement with civilian officials and doctors that keeping Algerians away from Europeans was one of the best ways to protect the latter from disease. See the Courrier de l’Algérie, the Tell, the Courrier d’Oran and the Akhbar throughout 1867 and 1868.
6 For demographics of these years of crisis, see Djilali Sari, Le Désastre Démographique (Algiers: Société Nationale d’Edition et de Diffusion, 1982), and Kamel Kateb, Européens, “Indigènes” et Juifs en Algérie (1830–1962): Représentations et réalités des populations, Paris: Éditions de l’Institut National d’Études Démographiques, 2001.
7 Lespès, René, Alger: Étude de géographie et d’Histoire urbaines (Paris: Librairie Félix Alean, 1930) 447–458Google Scholar.
8 Jean-Pierre Goubet, “La ville, miroir et enjeu de la santé: Paris, Montréal et Alger au XIXe siècle,” Histoire, économie et société v20 (2001), n3, p. 365.
9 Ibid., 365–67.
10 Alger, Comité du Vieil, Klein, Fondateur Henri, Feuillets d’El-Djezaïr (1937, reprint: Blida, Algeria: Editions du Tell, 2003)Google Scholar, Tome I, p. 10.
11 Goubet, 366.
12 Lespès, 450.
13 Lespès, 449–451.
14 Goubet, 367.
15 ANA Territoire du Sud 0730 letter Commandant Supérieur du Cercle de Laghouat to M15. the Général Commandant la Subdivision de Medea, 24 March 1885.
16 Ibid.
17 Davis, Diana K., “Desert ‘Wastes’ of the Maghreb: Desertification narratives in French Colonial Environmental History of North Africa,” Cultural Geographies 2004: 11: 359Google Scholar; and Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.
18 In addition to Davis, see Caroline Ford, “Reforestation, Landscape Conservation, and the Anxieties of Empire in French Colonial Algeria,” American Historical Review, April 2008: 341–362.
19 See Brett, Michael, “Legislating for Inequality in Algeria: The Senatus-Consulte of 14 July 1865,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 51, n. 3 (1988), 440–461Google Scholar; Collot, Claude, Les Institutions de l’Algérie durant la periode coloniale (1830–1962) (Paris: Edition du CNRS; Algiers: Office des Publications Universitaires, 1987), 86–89Google Scholar; passim, Rey-Goldzeigeur; Roberts, Stephen H., The History of French Colonial Policy, 1870–1925 (Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1963 [1929]), 198–99Google Scholar.
20 See the Courrier de l’Algérie, 1867:12 June, 15 June, 28July, 3 October, 30 October, 30 November; cleaning of homes was mandated by an arrêté of 2 August, 1867.
21 Courrier de l’Algérie, 25 August, 1867.
22 Coutrier de l’Algérie, 25 August, 4 October, 1867.
23 I would like to note the parallel attitudes toward the poor in the metropole and the indigenous population in the colony, not only in France: the story of Algerians being blamed for disease is not unlike John Snow identifying the Broad Street pump as the source of the cholera outbreak in London in 1854, in which he identified a certain spot in a poor section of town while leaving largely unchallenged the policy of the Southwark and Vauxhall Waterworks Company which delivered sewer-water to the pump in the first place. In Algeria as well we witness the displacement of responsibility to the victims of poor water policy. Similar attitudes concerning Paris have been explored by Barnes, David S., The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth Century France (Berkeley: University of Califoria Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Chevalier, Louis, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Howard Fertig, 1973, originally 1958)Google Scholar; and Kudlick, Catherine, Cholera in Post-Revolutionary Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)Google Scholar.
24 Courrier de l’Algérie, 28 July, 1867.
25 The aforementioned arrêté of 2 August 1867.
26 See Courrier de l’Algérie, 28 November, and 15, 22 December 1867.
27 Journal des Débats, February 26,1868; Courrier de l’Algérie, 3 January 1868.
28 I find Bob Jessop’s definition convincing: he sees the “state” as a strategic constellation of power relations. The nature and impact of state power depends upon the relationships between and among the various operations and institutions of power and the social, cultural, and political situations in which they exist. In the situation of colonial Algeria, the state was perhaps more pervasive, in that the network of interests aligned toward a common purpose (consciously stated or not) was often larger and more politically and militarily powerful than similar networks or congeries in the metropole. Jessop, Bob, State Power: A Strategic-Relational Approach (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2008)Google Scholar.
